In the beginning, we were all hunter-gatherers. Living in bands of twenty or thirty souls, it was hard for a single individual to lord it over the group like some sort of king or dictator. Though individuals tried, they lacked the means to secure the...

Education!It has the force to do so much good — to inform and inspire, encourage people to think for themselves, and prepare youngsters for adulthood. It should, at its very best, help citizens to become active participants in fully-functioning democ...

“It’s the company’s policy”.Have you ever heard those four gnarly words? You know it’s stupid. Your boss knows it’s stupid. But what can you do? Some out-of-touch bigwig in head office has decided this is the way things must be done, and there is not...

We live in a neoliberal era. And neoliberalism, in case you’re unaware, is dangerously ideological.This belief states that the private sector is always efficient, even when it is not. The public sector is never efficient, even when it is. Greed is al...

You will have probably have heard of entrepreneurs who, blowing their own trumpet, describe themselves as “Self-made”, or perhaps “Self-sufficient”.Alan Sugar is the king when it comes to making such statements. The millionaire presenter of The Appre...

Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such things as society”.The second half of this statement is not so well known. Thatcher would go on to claim that instead of there being a society, there were only “Individual men and women”.This ideological...

So far in this series, we have seen how metal money was imposed on societies by states, and how it was replaced with paper and wooden money. In this blog, we shall see how that paper money evolved into electronic money, created by priv...

In my last blog, which covered the early history of money, we saw how gold and silver coins were imposed on people by states, via taxation and conquest. In this blog, we shall see what happened when those states failed…The Romans brought their c...

Neoliberals often claim that reducing the size of the state will create a more efficient economy, as if the existence of the state is an impediment to the free market. This ideology has been used to justify the selling off of national assets, and th...

When I wrote my first two novels, I dedicated many months to research; reading for countless hours, and interviewing people in several countries.I took a new approach when I wrote The Little Voice: I looked within myself, and then wrote a person...

My latest book, ‘The Little Voice’, is inspired by the classic Russian novel, “Crime & Punishment”.I hope this doesn’t put you off! Classic Russian literature has a reputation for being long and difficult to read. But The Little Voice i...

I was expelled from school. Twice. And, looking back on it now, I must say that I’m incredibly proud of myself for that.Of course, that’s not how I felt about it at the time.Being expelled was crushing. A real rejection. I felt like my teachers were ...

My latest novel, ‘Occupied’, is set in a fictitious country in a fictitious world. But the events which take place in the first two sections are inspired by real events in Palestine, Kurdistan and Tibet. (The third section is inspired by the corporat...

The world-renowned academic and American Jew, Noam Chomsky, was asked about Israeli ‘apartheid’ by Democracy Now back in 2014. This is what he said:“In the occupied territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it ...

The word ‘Nakba’ literally means ‘disaster’. And for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and millions of their descendants, it was exactly that.In 1948 Israel was just a fledgling nation. It had been granted independence, and classed a ‘Jewish Sta...